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WHAT IF THIS WERE ENOUGH?

ESSAYS

A fun, often insightful read for digital fatalists.

A New York magazine columnist examines our current culture, which “exerts a constant pressure on us that severs our relationship to ourselves and each other.”

In her latest collection of essays, Havrilesky (How to Be a Person in the World: Ask Polly's Guide Through the Paradoxes of Modern Life, 2016, etc.) questions the way in which our society has shaped individuals who too often look to others for self-definition, who develop an identity based on the financial means with which they can purchase experiences, and who take to the digital sphere to create new exacerbations of old cultural tropes. “ ‘What should I be doing right now?' is a question that feels more urgent than ever,” writes the author. “Face-to-face, real-time connection to others feels fraught and awkward compared to the safe distance of digital communication. We maintain intimate virtual contact with strangers but seem increasingly isolated from our closest friends and family members.” In fact, the world Havrilesky describes is systematically injured by new developments in the digital and communication realms, making even the smallest interaction unnatural, the vaguest thought superfluous, and the idea of ambition old-fashioned. Throughout these essays, some of which were previously published in different forms, the author looks at a variety of cultural reference points, including the BuzzFeed phenomenon, the hegemony of Hollywood films, and foodie culture, to provide a crucial analytical perspective on human interactions and on the future. “The past is reduced to a slide show,” she writes. “The future is a YouTube video that won’t load. And the present is a jumble of jaunty yellow buttons blurting ‘omg’ and ‘awww’ and ‘tl;dr.’ What else can we do but click through?” Though there seems to be no escape from the world Havrilesky paints for her readers, she makes a point of offering a line of inquiry through which they can develop their own perspectives on society today, carving out their own space in the process.

A fun, often insightful read for digital fatalists.

Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-385-54288-3

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969

ISBN: 0375507892

Page Count: 235

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969

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